Now That Romney Is Up In The Polls, Republicans Suddenly Believe Them

For weeks we heard how wrong the polls are; now the naysayers suddenly believe them when the same polls favor their candidate. But here is the real explanation of what is going on.

For Pew, a nine-point Democratic advantage in mid-September is now plus one percentage point for the GOP. (The turnabout in “likely voters” was even more dramatic, shifting from Democrats up 10 to Republicans up five.)

The recent hullabaloo about adjusting samples (or, in the parlance of pollsters “weighting”) to pre-determined partisan splits misses that movements in party identification can be just as real as movements in voting intentions.

These polls show more people are now identifying as Republicans in the wake of Romney’s debate performance. Just as they showed a clear Democratic tilt earlier in the fall, and in the immediate aftermath of Romney’s “47 percent” comments. Shifts happen in the electorate. The only constant is change.